by Paul Watkins
“Ah,” said Fleury. It was a slow and cautious word that he breathed out, to show there would be no agreement yet.
Behr looked up. “‘Ah’ what?”
“Payments will be in gold bullion,” Fleury told him, “or I’ll take other paintings in trade.”
“I’m not authorized to give you bullion!” snapped Behr. He had gone red in the face. He picked at the iron cross that was pinned to his chest pocket, as if the pin had gone through to his flesh. “Who do you think you are?”
“I’m someone who can get you a painting by Cranach. I can have it by this time next week.”
“Cranach.” Behr repeated the name quietly. Three creases crumpled the skin of his forehead. “Lucas Cranach?”
Fleury nodded.
Behr swiped a thumb across his chin. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Why don’t you see about it now?” Fleury smiled at him patiently.
Behr’s shoulders slumped momentarily as he gave up being in charge. The name of Cranach had worked on him like the trigger of some long-ago hypnosis. He left the room without a word.
I stared at Fleury in amazement as he reached across to a wooden box on Behr’s desk. He opened it and held it out to me. “Would you like one of this little man’s cigarettes?”
I declined, so Fleury lit up on his own. He puffed contentedly until Behr returned.
“All right,” said Behr. He stopped and smelled the smoke. Then he seemed to dismiss the idea that anyone could possibly have swiped one of his cigarettes. “As long as you agree to exchanges of paintings as a preference to bullion.”
“Done,” said Fleury, “as long as you have paintings to trade.”
“Don’t you worry about that.” Behr leaned across the desk. He wanted to have the last word. “You’d better have that Cranach and it had better be the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen or I’ll kick your pompous arse all over this city. I told you I didn’t want this job and people like you are the reason why. This isn’t the kind of war I should be fighting.”
Fleury’s lips had gone a little crooked, as if he were trying to stop himself from laughing. “You’ll put up with me, Mr. Behr,” he said, “because I’ll make your bosses happy. And they’ll make you happy. Promote you out of this mausoleum of an office. Get you back to killing people, or whatever it is that you were born to do.”
* * *
“THAT POOR LITTLE MAN,” said Fleury, as we made our way down the Rue de Lille. “He’ll work as hard as he can now, in the hopes that they’ll reward him with a transfer back into action.” He said the word sarcastically. “The trouble is that the better he does, the less likely they are to let him go. I wonder if he’ll ever figure that out.”
I walked beside him in a reverential silence.
“That gold bullion bit was a nice touch,” I told him.
“It was no touch at all,” said Fleury. “All those Reichsmarks aren’t going to be worth anything if these Germans lose the war.”
“I take it you plan on getting rich,” I said, trying not to sound disgusted.
Fleury stopped and spun on his heel. He eyed me with curious amusement. “If my own country is going to turn me into a collaborator, I intend at least to profit from the experience. Besides, they need me. You couldn’t have done what I did in there. There’s a secret to dealing in art that none of you artists ever seem to figure out. It always amazes me how you manage to get anything done without people like me to look after you. What’s true or false or valuable or worthless all comes down to this”—and he pointed one finger directly at his eye—“whether I blink before you do.”
“Where do you have that Cranach stashed away?” I asked.
“I don’t have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re going to make one. You’ve been studying Cranach, haven’t you?”
It was true. “But in a week?” I asked. “It can’t be done so quickly! It will have to be done on wood if it’s Cranach.”
“It ought to be,” he confirmed.
“Even if Pankratov has the right materials, the paint won’t be dry in a week. It will take a couple of weeks at least, and that’s only if he force-dries it.”
“I know,” said Fleury.
“So why did you promise it to Behr in a week?” I demanded.
“To make him anxious,” said Fleury calmly.
“He’s not the only one you’re making anxious,” I told him.
Fleury smiled. “Remember not to blink, Monsieur Halifax.”
Chapter Eleven
PANKRATOV TURNED ON THE light in his warehouse. The silvery bulb filled each crack of rotten brick with shadow.
I sat down in Fleury’s chair with its ripped stuffing and immediately pulled the old horse blanket around me. “Can’t we get a fire going in here?” I asked.
Pankratov had brought along extra lights. He bolted them to spare easels, and directed them toward the middle of the room. Then, from his satchel, he pulled a heavy book in a black binding and handed it to me.
It was a collection of the works of Cranach. The illustrations were postcards fitted into gaps in the text, just like the ones Fleury had been collecting. Pankratov had marked a page that showed a portrait of a young girl, maybe eight years old, with fine blond hair that trailed down to her waist. She was dressed in black. The background was black, too. She wore a white shirt with a tiny collar, which was tied with a thin black ribbon. Her hands, which lay in her lap, were chubby like baby hands, and her nails were clearly outlined, which made them look at first a little dirty. She looked bored in the picture, with big child’s eyes and a pointy chin and ears too big to be flattering. Her shoulders were slumped, which made her look spoiled, as if she didn’t give a damn about being painted.
I used to wonder if the space of a couple of centuries really did produce people who looked different or whether it was just the clothing and the hairstyles that made them seem so out of place. There was no way you would not have noticed this girl if she walked by in the street. You could have dressed her up in some Catholic schoolgirl’s outfit and given her a satchel and stuck a chocolate bar in her hand, and made her like ten thousand other Parisian schoolgirls on their way home after classes, but you would still have noticed the proportions of her face, the roundness of it, the paleness. You’d think she didn’t eat well, that she didn’t breathe enough fresh air. She looked like a child who didn’t get enough affection. She looked as if she knew it, too.
When I looked at the text, which was only a couple of lines, I saw it was a portrait of Magdalena Luther, the daughter of Martin Luther. She had lived from 1529 to 1542. Only thirteen years. I looked at the picture again. I changed my mind about her looking spoiled. Instead, with that resigned expression on her face, she seemed to know how short her time would be. Too short to sit still and be painted. I wondered if Cranach himself might have had some inkling of her fast-approaching death, which was perhaps why he had used so much black. I thought of other portraits I’d seen, in which people had around them the trappings of their life, the things they were proud of and by which they claimed their rank in a society—fancy clothes, jewelry, hunting dogs and castles in the background. This girl had nothing, which could be some show of Lutheran purity, but it seemed to me more likely that this little girl just hadn’t been around long enough to know what her place was in the world, and what she valued and how she wanted to be seen.
I thought about Martin Luther and his wife. They would have known about their daughter’s frailty. It must have torn them up inside. Maybe they had commissioned the painting because they knew it might soon be all they had to remember her by.
My mind always made up stories around the silence of a picture, like a ghostly second frame. I closed the book with a dusty thump, sending her back into darkness. I breathed and looked up at Pankratov. “Why a portrait?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said.
I stood and rubbed my hands together to drive out the chill. “Let’s get going,” I said.
Pankratov laughed. “Not so fast. We’re not copying that painting.”
“Which one are we doing then?” I was filled with nervous energy and wanted to begin.
“We’re doing the portrait of Magdalena which Martin Luther himself rejected because it made her look too frivolous for the daughter of a religious man.”
I picked up the book and opened it again and started flipping through the pages. “Well, where is it?”
“It doesn’t exist yet,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said slowly, and closed the book.
Over the next few hours, we leafed through the pictures, choosing other paintings by Cranach and selecting from them certain articles of background, a tree just coming into bloom, a pale blue sky with long, thin clouds that were flattened out on the bottom and puffy on top. A double-banded pearl necklace held close to the throat.
Pankratov went to find us some lunch. He flung open the door. The sunlight was so bright that he recoiled from it as if the whole world outside were in flames. He staggered out into the glare and closed the door.
Now that I was alone, I noticed the sound of water dripping somewhere, and the rustle of wind down the alleyway. The cold that slithered through my skin became like something alive, as if the warehouse contained memories of all the living things that had passed through it. My presence here had brought them back to life in some half-formed way, which I sensed in the dead-clamminess around me. I was glad when Pankratov returned. The ghouls slipped away on their black and wide-toed feet into the shadows where they lived.
Pankratov found me studying the postcards with a magnifying glass. “These aren’t good enough to let me gauge the texture,” I said.
“Wait ten minutes,” he said. He set down two baguettes which he had tucked under his arm like rolled-up newspapers. Then from one pocket he pulled a wedge of cheese wrapped in white grease paper and from the other a bottle of hard cider with a homemade label made from cheesecloth glued to the glass and the word CIDRE written on it in pencil. “This is all they had at the shop down the road,” he said. He held the bottle up to one of the electric lights. “I hope we don’t go blind drinking it.”
“What’s going to happen in ten minutes?” I asked.
Pankratov didn’t have a chance to reply.
A black car with chrome fenders pulled up outside the open warehouse door. It was driven by a chauffeur with a gray cap. A woman sat in the back.
“Here she is,” said Pankratov. He walked out into the light.
The woman opened her car door. It was Emilia Pontier. She stepped out—tall and willowy.
“Madame Pontier,” said Pankratov.
“I’ve got what you asked for,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Mr. Halifax.”
“Hello,” I said quietly.
Pankratov and the chauffeur were fetching something out of the trunk. They seemed to know each other and there was the softness of laughter in the quiet words that passed between them.
“I’ll be back in two days to collect what I’ve lent you. You won’t see it again, so spend your time well.” She looked up and down the row of warehouse doors, at the crumbled brick up on the train tracks and at the gravel of the road beneath her feet. She shook her head, then got back in the car.
Pankratov and I watched the limousine pull away down the alley, dust already settling. When the car was gone, Pankratov turned to me. “I once heard it said about Emilia Pontier that she has no respect for people, only for their history.”
It was only now that I noticed the painting in Pankratov’s arms. It was wrapped in white sheeting and bound with hemp string. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
Back inside the warehouse, Pankratov removed the covering. It was the original painting of Magdalena Luther. The piece was small, a foot by a foot and a half. It was done on a wood panel that had traces of wormholes on the back. The panel was beveled like a mirror. Pankratov set up the easel. The strong lights encased it in a marmalade glow.
“Where have they been hiding it?” I asked.
Pankratov shrugged, chewing nervously on a thumbnail. “Could have been in a bank vault. Could have been halfway across the country in a wine cellar. I don’t know. But we have it for two days. Let’s just hope that’s long enough.”
We began by studying the back of the painting. We tried to match the type of wood with something from Pankratov’s collection of wood panels. After rooting around for a few minutes, Pankratov did find a painted oak slab. It was slightly larger than the Cranach. There were two marks on the back of Pankratov’s oak panel. One was an oval with a crown on the top and a J in the middle. The other was a lion’s head with a zigzag line underneath. These were the stamps of private collectors, to show that they had owned the works. Pankratov looked them up in a book. The lion was the mark of an eighteenth-century collector named Antonio Leonid, who lived in Milan around 1790. Pankratov said we should leave the stamps there, at least until Fleury told us to get rid of them.
The painting on the front was of two young girls, both in matching white dresses. They were holding hands and looked vaguely lost, as if they had stayed still for the artist because they were afraid to move. Fear showed in the blankness on their faces and in the worried pouting of their lips. The background was a curtain and a chair, drab and green. It looked like the kind some artists used to paint in advance, adding their subjects later in order to speed up the process. The girls didn’t seem to belong with the rest of the painting. There was no equation between the shadows of the draping curtain and the presence of the two sad girls, whose lives had been and gone before the lives of my great-great-grandparents had even begun.
Painted in a scroll fashion across the top were the Latin words Sanctum in Memoriam.
“Sacred to the memory,” I translated.
“Whoever kept those women as a sacred memory,” said Pankratov, “has long since been reunited with them.” He poured some acetone into a small white dish.
I felt wretched as their faces smeared and vanished with the dabs of turpentine. At last the bony whiteness of the undercoat glimmered through. It left us with a blank space on which we could begin our work.
Pankratov scanned the Cranach with a magnifying glass. He stood still in front of it for a long time, as if Magdalena Luther were in fact alive beneath the minute spiderweb of cracks across the paint and it was only a question of waiting to see when she would flinch. “Here,” he said, waving me over. “Look.”
We brought our faces close to the painting. Our breath clouded the paint and disappeared and clouded up again. This was the kind of closeness that would have a museum guard running across a gallery and shouting at us to get back.
“You see how it’s built up?” he asked. “Here. Around her face. Around her neck. And here, the way her hands are resting.” He waved the magnifying glass over the chair and oval mirror in the background. Their images loomed up large and shrank back down again when the magnifying glass had moved on. “With the rest of it, he was confident. But here he kept shifting her around.”
I looked at the girl’s face and tried to read Cranach’s frustration in the soft, pale angles of her cheekbones.
“We will do a version,” said Pankratov, turning the magnifying glass slowly by its handle, like the crystal of a miniature lighthouse. “It will be good, but not so good that someone could not understand why Luther might have wanted something different. Do you see?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Now paint.”
And suddenly, set free from the seemingly endless training, I knew I could do it. The complexity was all there in my head, too much to grasp in any single thought, but all there, bunched up and tangled, and the only way to untangle it was simply to work and not think about working, but just work.
As I began, Pankratov settled into his sacred chair. He touched his fingertips together.
When I glanced at him a moment later, he seemed to have gone into a trance.
I worked through the nigh
t, not feeling fatigue. As I blinked sweat from my eyes, the image of the girl would shimmer and dissolve. My hips hurt from standing and I rocked on the balls of my feet to keep the blood flowing. At one point, I looked over at the fire and saw that it had died down. Pankratov was asleep, curled in a blanket with his coat folded up as a pillow. I left the canvas and walked over to him. I squatted down in front of the fire, reaching my hands out to the embers and feeling the heat work its way into my bones. Then I took a few more lumps of coal from the pile and stoked up the fire again. Thick clots of smoke gave way to the salt-burn blue of flames.
Cranach had painted the face with several different brushes in a very small area. I kept three brushes in my hand at the same time, each one locked between my fingers.
I made her face pale but had added a little color, the faintest glimmer of warm blood deep beneath the wintry opaqueness of skin. I kept in her expression the tiredness of a child not wanting to sit still in one place for a long time. I kept the same angle of her head and hands and the thin reediness of her hair. I made it clear that she was still a sickly child.
Using details from other Cranach paintings, I gave her a medium blue dress and painted her outside under a cold but cheerful sky, like a day at the end of winter when the spring is coming but not yet there and the fields are still muddy and the country lanes still pocked with brown-water puddles. I painted the bony branches of a tree reaching into the frame and I put those same flattened clouds in the sky.
I liked painting on the wood. The solidity of it. The way it did not give, as canvas did, against the pressure of the brush.
Over the course of the next few hours, I redid her hands a little to be less spidery. I gave her a plain silver ring. I was careful to paint over the work I changed, to build up the layers of paint as Cranach had done in the original.
Pankratov woke up around six. He looked around as if he had no idea where he was. Then the daze of sleep left his eyes. “How is it?” he croaked at me.